Top singer seiyuu Nana Mizuki has expressed her “profound sadness” at news that one of her fans got himself arrested after illegally dumping the 208kg of potato chips he bought to get the chance to meet her on stage – not least because one of her own fans has just undone all the days she spent charitably picking up garbage herself.
The crisps contained lottery tickets which would grant an invitation onto the stage to 10 winners at Nana Mizuki’s upcoming August concert.
The 25-year-old Hyogo prefecture salaryman was so desperate to get one that he bought 89 boxes of the snack, each containing roughly 1,000 packets and costing ¥300,000 in total.
He unsurprisingly enough had no intention of eating them all, but found he had no way of getting rid of the 208kg of unwanted food and packaging (paying someone to dispose of them apparently being out of the question), and so dumped them all in 6 different wooded locations in the nearby towns.
Police took a dim view of this illegal littering and soon caught up with him, arresting him on charges of unlawful dumping, which he admitted, noting that “I bought a lot, but found I was having trouble getting rid of them so I threw them away.”
Ironically enough Nana Mizuki is a “special supporter” of the “MaruGomi” project, which encourages “people everywhere to have a fun time picking up trash at the same time, on the same day, and with the same feelings,” and spends a day each year picking it up – which probably would not go very far in clearing up the mess her fan made.
Hearing about the incident from a manager, she was “incredibly sad” – telling her fans “I wish from the bottom of my heart that nothing like this ever happens again.”
With the colossal wastefulness of idol marketing already attracting much attention in the wake of the general election, there are by now more than a few Japanese who are disgusted by the nation’s already seemingly pointless recycling efforts being undone completely by the music industry mafia – though with otaku spending being pure Abenomics there seems to be no danger of anyone actually doing anything about it.
Stop blaming the music industry “mafia”. Nobody is forced to become dumbshit and waste their money and life on it. It’s their conscious choice to become one. So let them, couldn’t care less.
Must have taken some time to open 89,000 packets.
Why didn’t he just donate them to a food bank or something…?
There are a lot of reasons.
Food banks are very much a recent American concept. They didn’t exist until the 1960s.
The Japanese don’t have any real concept of a food bank.
Second Harvest Japan is the only major food bank in Japan. It’s also fairly recent since it didn’t exist until 2000 or so. I think donations have to be delivered to Tokyo. This guy’s in Hyogo, so he’s about 300 miles away. Other charities don’t take food donations.
For the most part, you can’t donate opened products to a food bank. I’d think that single serve bags can’t be donated outside of their original bulk packaging, but I don’t know that for sure. However, I doubt any food bank wants junk food. They’d much rather have things like rice or canned goods.
Most people just don’t have extra food to donate. It won’t fit in your one room mansion, you don’t get any discounts for purchasing in bulk, and you can just walk to a konbini or supa.
Bureaucracy makes it hard to get registered as deduction eligible, so very few Japanese organizations are deduction eligible. Simply being an NPO isn’t enough in Japan. Most NPOs and civic orgs aren’t deduction eligible.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Im sure he wasnt so unlucky that he found the ticket in the very last box he opened
Wastefur Dispray
Wasutefuru Disupreii.
Wasutefaru Disupureii, get it right you idiot.
Stupid consumer competition prize s♥♥t will inevitably lead to dumping crap everywhere.
Soon Japan will be a waste dump of idol cd boxes and idol food products.